This article expounds on the construct of interracial dissonance,
first introduced into the literature in 2010 (i.e., Chandler, 2010) as a
means of understanding the nonparticipation of many Black people in
mental healthcare. Without a doubt, race continues to be a leading
social metaphor that most often impacts human relations in objectionable
ways. Whether in the United States or India, Europe or the West Indies,
racial contention is continuously shaping the ways in which individuals
interact with one another, and how or whether communities interact with
systems. While the effects of racism on problems like health, education,
and economic disparities are well articulated throughout literature and
practice, the causes and cures of social complications are found far
less in academic and lay discourses. Especially in Black-White
relations, nuanced understanding is critical to treating disparities and
ridding the world of hate and confusion. Interracial dissonance
functions as a defining term for the uncomfortable and obscure nature of
interethnic relations, as well as a psychological concept that deals
with the internal processes of people and their collectives.

June 15, 2011, I boarded an airplane leaving Dallas, TX headed
toward Cleveland, OH. As I walked through the aisle to take my seat, I
noticed that almost every European American's eyes were fixed on
me; the usual "Black person present" scene in situations where
White and Black people unknown to one another share physical spaces.
Their various eyes read curiosity--of many sorts--anxiety, and annoyance
at my presence. Worse than the reality of relative obscurity that I
found myself at the center of, I became acutely aware of the dissonance
felt by the European American passengers around me. Standing just over
five feet and four inches tall, although not quite five-five, weighing
about 150 lbs., wearing glasses and carrying a laptop bag full of books,
few would describe me as threatening. Yet, the White man and White woman
seated next to me, apparently strangers to one another also, fumbled
over their words with me as we arranged ourselves in our seats. They all
but jumped to answer minor questions, their eyes meeting mine for only
short spurts of time. The European flight attendants acted in much the
same awkwardness and discomfort when serving me the drinks and snacks
that come complimentary on most American airlines. To the contrary,
however, the interactions between the White attendants and my White
seatmates seemed fluid, comfortable, and essentially effortless.

Fast-forward about three hours, and I am sitting in a restaurant
with my close friend who had picked me up from the airport. It was just
past 3:00pm, and therefore past the lunchtime rush. The restaurant was
sparsely peopled and we had our choice of many dining tables or booths.
As the host sat us, my friend objected to the selected seating and opted
to sit toward the far end of the restaurant. The host obliged, although
confused, sat us, and left us to view the menus. As he walked away, my
friend explained to me, "I'm sorry, but I don't feel like
being around White people," through a look of combined exhaustion
and repugnancy. The irritation that I felt from my uncomfortable
three-hour-long flight evaporated with sudden immediacy at the
revelation that both sides, Black and White, feel much the same about
the other. My African American friend had just expressed much of the
same sentiment that an airplane full of White people had demonstrated to
me just a few minutes prior; only we were confined to an airplane and
had not the luxury of changing seats.

Rather than a revelation, what my friend gave me, unbeknownst to
her, was confirmation of my own estimation regarding the layered
coexistence between Black and White people, layering unknown to any
other two ethnic groups due to many historical events, and also distinct
cultural dialectics. I have described the quality of Black-White
relationships as one of interracial dissonance (Chandler, 2010), defined
as feelings of physical, psychological, and social disconnect resulting
in divergent ideas and intentions which serve to order the
phenomenological properties that shape the perceptions and interactions
of people in cross-racial situations. Where the ultimate humanitarian
goal seeks human understanding and progress, the precarious nature of
interracial interactions between those born of African ancestry and
those born of European ancestry is one still requiring serious and
sensitive consideration.

In the particular work that introduced the term, for instance,
focus was placed on the ramification of underutilization of mental
healthcare in the Black community stemming from the collective
realization that our ways of living and our self-strivings differ
significantly from Whites' both in their concerns for us and their
own cultural tendencies. The dissonance felt by an overwhelming number
of the Black community has led to disengagement from other Eurocentric
systems as well, most noticeably the schools. Where Terrell and Terrell
(1981) have coined the term of cultural mistrust to describe distrust of
White people based on a history of discrimination and prejudice in the
sectors of education, interpersonal relations, business, politics, and
law, interracial dissonance contends that the tumultuous associations
that Black and White people share extend beyond social and political
equality to cultural and even spiritual fields.

In response to interracial dissonance, many Black people opt to
remain clear of White-dominated systems not only because they are bright
enough to be apprehensive of oppressive people and institutions, but
because they realize that most White people either objectify, fear or
loathe them. In their places of dissonance, White people tend to
construct imaginative justifications for their social and political
status, and for social and political controls systemically placed over
Black and other communities. What has remained unfounded or unclear is
how the two divergent positions might intersect harmoniously.

The reality is that the types of encounters described above happen
daily and to millions of people (e.g., see Sue et al., 2007). Rather
than make any judgment about the positivity or negativity of the social
and cultural differences between Black and White communities, the
purpose of this work is to make sense of the reality of dissonance in
order that Black people can know and understand their center to then
enact their respective agency optimally as Black people, and vice versa
for Whites, without imposing on or in any way discomforting the other.
With this, at the crux of these encounters is a lack of intercultural
understanding, especially White to Black (Bauval & Brophy, 2011;
Kennedy, 2003; Loe & Miranda, 2005), and holes in intracultural
awareness, especially amongst Black people, that leaves both groups of
people essentially caricatures of particular images and ideas void of
philosophical, traditional, spiritual and aesthetic bases--void of
conscious culture (Nkrumah, 1964/2009; Wilson, 1993; X, 1967/1990). The
result is everything except harmony. Yet, most Black and White people
have become so accustomed to the dissonance felt one to the other that
we no longer question or consciously reflect on it. What we become left
with are crackas and coons, empty vessels of supremacist, "White
devils" and heathen, "Black animals", rather than
European and African descended men, women and children with particular
cultural frames, strengths and ways of interacting.

Not Human: How Crackas and Coons Come to Replace People

The futile consciousness held by too many is gravely problematic,
even in the 21st century. A critical example involves the development of
children. Most of us do not stop to think about what interracially
dissonant feelings mean to our children as they gallop off to
interracial schools every day, in spite of the fact that they must learn
how to interact effectively with both White and Black people, whether
the children be Black or White themselves. Neither do the majority of us
consider what interracial dissonance means in the cases of policy,
hiring committees, and admissions boards. Meanwhile, antagonism grows
along with school failure, unemployment, and political misadventures
(e.g., Alliance for Excellent Education, 2010; Children's Defense
Fund, [CDF], 2007; Chandler, 2010; Picca & Feagin, 2007). Where the
West has become fascinated by discussion and study of race and racism,
what is needed globally is re-attention to cultures and intercultural
relationships. Rather than see each other as cultural groups, we have
come to view one another almost solely as racial groups. As a result,
interracial dissonance becomes prevalent whereas intercultural awareness
should permeate our collective consciousness in the interest of all
humanity.

Atmospheres of interracial dissonance are much easier to create and
heighten from social positions than cultural ones (Myers, 2002). From a
social stance, people become isolated beings; that is individuals rather
than members of collectives--cultural groups. As a collective,
people's ways of communicating, acting, dressing, eating, mourning,
worshipping, etc. are accountable to their cultural beliefs (Myers,
2003). As a social being, however, it becomes possible, and easy, to
attribute a person's ways of communicating, acting, dressing,
eating, mourning, worshipping, etc. to their individual proclivities,
and that person can therefore be blamed for certain events and labeled a
number of negative and even hostile terms that dilute his or her
qualities as a human being who is a part of a cultural group. It should
be understood here that race is more a social construct than a cultural
or even genetic quality (Allport, 1954/1979; Picca & Feagin, 2007).
So, as racial beings people become severed from the cultural
philosophies that developed them and veritably dictate their thinking,
acting and even feeling. What could and should be thought of as cultural
distinctions become social variations, and social variations are almost
always viewed as matters of choice. In the case of interracial settings
then, it is expected that individuals can and should mutate themselves
in ways that agree with the assumed norms, typically those functions of
the social majority, so as to maintain "order". This is to say
that anomalous social variations are considered resolvable, wherein a
person is viewed as opting to abide by social norms or not, rather than
acting from their national center.

Myers (2002) illustrates what I refer to as the social variant
model of understanding human distinctions on racial bases in the
following excerpt. He asks,

The author is correct in his summation of salience based on
distinctions, however, he fails to capture the full weight of the race
versus culture, and nonhuman versus human problem in situations that
occur as social incidents, but rest on historical events and cultural
dynamics.

Cultures and the creation of highly organized societies have long
been said to be the factors that separate human beings from other
animals. I would argue, however, that it is not the production of
cultures and societies that separate us from other animals, for many
nonhuman species are studied by zoologists for their intricate life
systems, but rather it is the human being's proclivity to forget
and manipulate histories and people that separates us. Having
conveniently forgotten the cultural beliefs and traditions embraced
throughout widespread African regions, including the importance of
family, ancestral reverence, agriculture, building, and education at the
outset of the European slave era that dispersed Black people so widely
and heretofore permanently across the world (Herskovits, 1958; Walker,
2001; Woodson, 1936/1968), people of European ancestry are comfortable
today with identifying Black people with the social terms that they as
White people gave them at a time when Black people began to be openly
viewed and treated as subhuman. In the case of "a Black", as
Myers (2002) put it, entering a White group, the real problem arises in
that the group actually sees a thing rather than an African man or
woman, be that man or woman African American, Afro-Brazilian, Haitian,
Jamaican, Nigerian, Senegalese, Ghanaian, Cameroonian, etc. Quite
easily, what White people continue to see in Black people is their own
imaginative creations instead of people.

On the White Side

The history of enslavement in the Americas, and colonization of
localized territories by conglomerations of small European nations
through the use of weaponry, religion and psychology is gory and
well-articulated in the literature (e.g., see Ani, 2012; Chandler, 2010;
Asante & Hall, 2011; Block, 2004; Kerber & De Hart, 2004).
Rather than recast European and African history in depth here, attention
is given to the critical remnants of the two sagas, and more
specifically, the residue that has left Black and White people alike
displaced in shared spaces. In general, Europeans have lost nearly all
sight of African peoples' pre-colonial personalities, customs,
political systems, and achievements.

How did this happen? Essentially, Europeans succeeded at near total
repression of African peoples strengths and independent positions to the
recesses of their subconscious as the first requirement for justifiable
domination and brutality (The Fanon Project, 2010; Wilson, 1998). Yet,
and this is where internal dissonance arises and later contributes to
interactive dissonance- that is disconnect and distance from
others-repressed stimuli, be they sensations or memories, never fully
disappear. Where White people have historically done well with
repressing the strengths and natural positions of Black people, the
power of the human mind is such that subliminal perception continues to
inform the conscious awareness, however cognizant or ignorant to the
subliminal one may be; veritably confusing and worrying the actor
(Hockenbury & Hockenbury, 2000). What happens next, in response to
this internal dissonance, is creation and use of various defense
mechanisms against the interracial dissonance.

Defensiveness among White people occurs most often either in
protection of cognitive distortions that reduce personal anxiety, or in
protection of comforts manifested from the success of the psychological
repression, such as material property or social prestige; and sometimes
both at once (Freud, 1961/2010; Cress-Welsing, 1991). Sigmund Freud, a
continental European from Austria (just as we say "continental
Africans" to refer to Africans born and raised in Africa so too
should we refer to Europeans within Europe as "continental
Europeans"), was brilliant in his decontextualizing the minds and
behavioral proclivities of his people. According to Freud, psychological
repression is "the most fundamental ego defense" as the
unconscious exclusion of anxiety-provoking thoughts, feelings, and
memories from conscious awareness (as cited in Hockenbury &
Hockenbury, 2000, p. 435). Fundamental, yet impermanent:

As Freud (1939/1967) explained, "The repressed material
retains its impetus to penetrate into consciousness." In other
words, if you encounter a situation that is very similar to one
you've repressed, bits and pieces of memories of the previous
situation may begin to resurface. In such instances, the ego may employ
other defense mechanisms that allow the urge or information to remain
partially conscious. (Hockenbury & Hockenbury, 2000, p. 435)

In the case of entire histories of a people being the subject of
repression by another, naturally, merely encountering the people who
represent that which should be forgotten causes a reflexive type of
anxiety or hostility in the egos of the would-be repressors. Freud
referred to psychological defensiveness generally as ego defense
mechanisms. While ego defenses are proposed to be unconscious
self-deceptions (Hockenbury & Hockenbury, 2000), in many ways the
ego serving the id, we should consider for how long a repressed history
that never extinguishes in the mind remains subconscious. Especially as
more and more Black people enter spaces previously monopolized by Whites
in the 16th to 20th centuries, and as pre-colonial Black history is
continuously rediscovered, the unconscious for White people must be
becoming conscious on more regular bases.

Pertaining to modern day race relations between European Americans
and African Americans, for example, have we reached the point that ego
defenses have actually become conscious defenses on the part of a
significant number of White people? It seems that more and more often,
Europeans are acting on the reality principle, which Freud theorized was
people's, namely White people's, drive to delay gratification
based on their environmental circumstances at the time. The reality now
for most White people in Black-White conditions, as a result of the ego
defenses they have erected over centuries to support their mental
repressions about Black people, is one in which their internal stability
exists only outside of the presence of Black people, causing them to
have to delay the fundamentally human gratification that comes from
being honest and secure as people until they are again amongst
themselves.

Using ego defense mechanisms is often a way of buying time while we
[White people] consciously or unconsciously wrestle with more realistic
solutions for whatever is troubling us. But when defense mechanisms
delay or interfere with our use of more constructive coping strategies,
they can be counterproductive. (Hockenbury & Hockenbury, 2000, p.
436)

Here we reach the existential cutoff point between White and Black
people collectively. For White people, whose chosen saga, meaning the
imaginary history of European supremacy that their repression of
Africans allows, the only "realistic solution" to the troubles
of relating with Black people is compliance with the self-created
history that has served to give them the physical, psycho-emotional, and
social stability that they have experienced for approximately the past
five centuries (Asante & Mazama, 2002). Clearly, Europeans have not
yet learned "constructive coping strategies" to deal with
reality, let alone multiple realities, instead of their collective
fantasies. In the Black-White coexistence, however, the solution of
compliance with perceptions that have created the White reality as it
stands today is indeed counterproductive; it is in fact not a solution
at all.

On the Black Side

Where most Whites encounter Black people half-heartedly as a matter
of repressive necessity in the work of forgetting the pre-colonial Black
man and his nations, most Black people behave in the way of suppression
of their own perspectives and traditions when in the presence of White
people as a matter of survival. This is to say that Black people have
learned through as many centuries as White people have taken to
effectively repress their memories and create their super egos to stifle
their natural thoughts and hold back their behavioral responses as Black
people, or better African people. It should go without saying that the
very physical survival of Black people, especially in the days of
evidently racist and anti-African laws, has rested on their
agreeableness to the lot of White people; or so many Blacks have
thought.

In the case of a clash between two cultures and phenotypes of
people so vastly different, not necessarily bad, but different, the
oppressed group is faced with the misfortune of a psychological force
that asks of them to appeal to the psychology of the dominant group in
order to then gain some sense of harmony, however small or false the
sense is.

Baldwin (1962/1991), Du Bois (1903/2003), and Fanon (1961/1963),
and later Akbar (2003), Cress-Welsing (1991), and Nobles (2006) have
explained well, albeit in different ways and from different fields of
study, the notion that Black people have gained the educational
equivalent of Ph.D.'s in understanding the mind(s) of White people
as their psychology pertains to Black people. The utility of these
Ph.D.'s in Survival, so to speak, for Black people lie in the
domains of school, work, and church. Many, many Black people do what
must be done in order to protect themselves and their families, and live
in relative comfort in situations where they sense being social or
numerical minorities. So good are some Black people at appealing to
White people that they can almost convince themselves that they are
being themselves, in much the same vein as White people who claim to be
color-blind or get along fine with Black people. The forward-thinking
Ancestor Amos Wilson (1993) referred to this condition as
"consequences of historical amnesia" within the Pan African
community (p. 33). In reality, however, and that is the reality of most
Black people, the fallacy and the strain of suppression of their
Blackness is felt; and it reveals itself in the interracial dissonance
and its effects that Black people feel with White people.

He [Malcolm X] argued that the Negro only tells the white man what
he believes the white man wishes to hear, and that the art of
dissembling reached a point where even Negroes cannot truthfully say
they understand what their fellow Negroes believe. The art of deception
practiced by the Negro was based on a thorough understanding of the
White man's mores, he said; at the same time, the Negro has
remained a closed book to the white man, who has never displayed any
interest in understanding the Negro. (Handler, 1965, p. xxvii)

At least two important aspects of Malcolm X's intelligence
about the conditions of his people inform interracial dissonance on
"the Black side". One, the confusion that affects Black people
disturbed by self-suppression results in internal conflicts as much as,
if not more often than, interethnic conflict. Fanon (1961/1963) said it
this way,

Though usually unconscious of the internal confusion impressed upon
them, Black people respond to it through scorn and resentment of White
people--and unfortunately, sometimes other Black people although only
Whites are the proprietors of the repression and confusion that Blacks
feel. The contempt and bitterness that Black people feel from too many
dreams deferred becomes lost in a sea of identity confusion and
simultaneous desire for reclamation. Imagine that one values his life
and culture, and therefore his ethnic kinsman's, but cannot
celebrate or nurture either freely. This is an extremely difficult
position, a volatile one. And this is the position of many Africans
globally (Goffe, 2012).

Rather than having the freedom to live freely according to our own
philosophical, traditional, spiritual and aesthetic culture when in the
presence of, or settings controlled by Europeans, Africans are forced to
live under masks that massage the sensitivities of White people if we
are to do so without additional conflict or discomfort, primarily on the
physical level. This is because if we are ourselves, then the subliminal
for White people becomes unquestionably and uncomfortably conscious.
Suddenly, for example, Black intelligence is back, rearing its head
against supposed White dependence when a Black man or woman speaks
"articulately" from his or her own perspective. It seems
logical that in the background of their minds in such moments, White
people become apprehensive, nervous about what might be created or
decided by intelligent Black minds (e.g., Cress-Welsing, 1991). Not only
is there the aspect of a fear factor for White people when Black people
for one reason or another refuse to suppress themselves, but there is
also very likely a disillusionment component. Displays of Black
perspectives, customs, styles and intelligence obviously borne of a
culture not European, but African in its derivatives prove false the
assertion of American or European universality. Once again, unless Black
people participate by contributing their part of self-suppression in the
theatrical play of interracial relations, then White people are forced
to face the reality that the European democracy, with its
color-blindness and cosmopolitan dreams, is only rhetoric, not real.

Becoming Human Again

And yet, in everyone's reality, we are real people. We are
not, or rather we do not have to be, deviants and caricatures to one
another. Where White people continue to act as the all-seeing eyes,
imposing their imagined history and supremacy on themselves and on
others, they will continue to render themselves White devils, the
crackas that African Americans and other people love to hate (e.g.,
Fadiman, 1997; Ture & Thelwell, 2003). Similarly, where Black people
continue to act as intellectual menials, without opinion or culture of
their own, they will continue to render themselves caricatures, coons
developed from White imagination, never really at peace or optimal
development themselves. Rather than accept having to bear one another,
veritably holding our breaths and counting down the minutes until we are
free from the mental strain and spiritual pain that comes from hiding
our true thoughts and tendencies from one another, we should begin,
Black and White, once and for all, to learn about and accept each other.

For White people, who have grown to accept White privilege above
all else, it should be said that the time has come for learning and
accepting others without self-interest. It is fair to say that some
thoughts and tendencies are shielded from others because they are
dastardly and inhumane, and for these there should be self-initiated
exorcisms. Whether this last point actualizes or not, Black, and other,
people can achieve far more mental health, physical health, cultural
revival, and educational and economical achievement by taking up their
reigns against self-suppression for the salvation, entertainment or
profit of others. All the world does not have to be a stage as
Shakespeare opined (e.g., Stern, 2012); we can now leave the acting to
the domain of the arts, for the development of our children and the
ending of mass imprisonment and underachievement today requires the
consciousness of "real" people.

Intercultural Awareness: A Cure for Interracial Dissonance

White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how
to live. Rather, the white man is himself in sore need of new standards,
which will release him from his confusion and place him once again in
fruitful communion with the depths of his own being. And I repeat: The
price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the
blacks-the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the
law, and in the mind (Baldwin, 1962/1991, p. 96-97).

I do not consider myself to be an ideological follower of the late
brother James Baldwin, however, certain truths are striking across
social and political lines. An absolute truth in the area of race and
ethnicity is that it is a concept that was created based on social and
capital premises devoid of cultural relevance. Yet, it is a social
construct that has had real and significant effects on ethnic groups,
both in how respective groups see and treat themselves and how they see
and interact with other groups (Kennedy, 2003; Whaley, 2001). Therefore,
any discussion of resolution of racial problems, such as interracial
dissonance, calls for cultural inclusion if it is to be effective.
Understanding that racism has impacted sharply the minds of both Black
and White alike, not in the same ways but in equally detrimental ones,
what must be understood now, is whether and how the relationships of
African and European people can be restored to the days of yore when
both moved about free from discomfort and the need for backstages and
frontstages (Picca & Feagin, 2007). There was in fact a time, for
instance, when Europeans coexisted with Africans without hostility,
thievery or demands of drudgery (Browder, 1992; Feagin, 2001). Who were
we then, or rather, what did we see in ourselves and in each other that
allowed space for freedom of expression and development? What must be
the 21st century mantra is intercultural awareness.

The Starting Place

One precedes two just as the first comes before the second. In much
the same sense, coming to understand others becomes possible only after
understanding yourself. The first step in achieving intercultural
knowledge then is mastering intra-cultural awareness. Intra-cultural
awareness, meaning self-and self-cultural knowledge, actually begins at
birth. However, mastery of the first step in gaining intercultural
awareness comes only through thorough and nuanced understanding of
community and family history. Especially in the historically
mis-educated and socio-politically volatile world that we currently
live, intra-cultural awareness must be intentional.

For White people, intra-cultural awareness has to be understood to
include confrontation of feelings of guilt and remorse (e.g., Helms,
1990). As a result of careful treatment of the guilt and remorse that is
inevitable if a given White person has left any fiber of compassion,
intercultural learning for White people can be freer of fear of the
other. For Black people, intracultural awareness as it grows will
include feelings of loss, anger, and very possibly resentment or hate
(e.g., Vandiver, Fhagen-Smith, Cokley, Cross, & Worrell, 2001).
Appreciating these responses through the course of self-learning and
rediscovery, more Black people will have far less difficulty with
healing and moving forward with their own minds and activity, no matter
whose presence they are in.

To reach understanding of "Ba ", the African concept for
soul, we must go through our consciousness, our very awareness of
ourselves (Nobles, 2006, p. 298). Before Ba, however, is Akh, our spirit
element, and following both is Kah, the psyche, as in the mind. We are
today facing crises of spirit, consciousness, and psyche. Consider this:

Now the visible and the invisible elements become important to
understand because the invisible is greater than the visible even though
they are one in the same. That sounds like a contradiction but when we
put Aristotle into the game, we start talking about logical
consistencies, meaning that something cannot be one in the same or equal
and one be greater than the other at the same time.... My body, my
physical being is a manifestation of my spirit even though my spirit is
far greater than my body. I should not even call it my spirit because it
is not mine, it is ours. (Nobles, 2006, p. 307).

An assertion based on simple logic, but having significant and
multifarious repercussions, it is a matter of world survival that White
and Black people return to the their personal and shared beginnings--not
because White and Black people rule the world or are the most important
people in it, but because we are connected to the rest of the world and
continuation of the dissonance characteristic of our relationship today
will signal the end of successful international relations for
generations to come.

The world watched the changing shape of American socio-politics
throughout the 20th century and used their observations to inform their
associations within the United Nations and with the U.S. directly
(Chandler, 2010; Black, Spence, & Omari, 2004; Ture & Thelwell,
2003; Ture & Hamilton, 1967/1992). In much the same way, we observe
now in the 21st century how the 2008 Presidential race in the United
States, President Barack Obama's inauguration, and more recently,
the nationally recognized murder of Trayvon Martin in February of 2012
are discussed internationally with sincere and critical interest (Mazama
& Asante, 2012; Zirin, 2012). White people, and especially European
Americans, must take assessment of their individual and collective
desire to resurrect their spirits in order to face their souls and
change their minds in their contribution toward dissolving interracial
dissonance. Black people must begin their contribution by first
liberating our minds and re-learning our natural cultures, abilities and
worth in order to nurture our collective spirits and souls as Black
folk. Starting requires confrontation of the real issues, and while
confrontation may be difficult it is a necessity en route to our final
destination of interracial concord and harmony.

The Final Destination

When interracial dissonance has been overrun by intercultural
awareness, itself informed by intra-cultural knowledge, we will know by
very concrete evidences. First, Black people will begin to notice a new
sense of freedom to be, whether in classrooms or boardrooms--or
airplanes and restaurants. Second, our physical appearances and
movements will reflect our newfound comfort even when in the presence of
White people, who many of us have heretofore strained ourselves to
accommodate. For example, the baritone in our voices will echo from the
walls and the kinks and waves in our hair will be more often observed
outside of our homes. Even more, the sounds of our voices will relay our
family and community perspectives, and we will have no apprehension or
fear of threat in saying so. Our personal aesthetics, communication
styles and dispositions will be evidence of freedom from fear, shame or
self-hatred as we dress, walk and talk in ways that our spirits and
traditions instruct us to. In all of this freedom, White people will be
... cool.

To be cool means that one has struck the balance between managing
his mind and matching his actions to his spirit (Ani, in press;
Thompson, 1974). We will know that intercultural awareness has overcome
interracial dissonance when White people demonstrate in far greater
numbers that they are capable of asserting their opinions without
imposing them on others. We will also know because their eyes will tell
the same story as their smile and their actions; White people will have
reconnected with their spirit of exchanging and accepting as human
beings with other humans (e.g., Cleaver, 1968/1992). In a climate of
intercultural awareness, the perspectives of people outside of
one's cultural group are accepted as the other groups right and
truth. Equally as important, people outside of one's own ethnic
group are recognized as human with equally important needs to your own.

Therefore, in an intercultural climate White people would have
greater ability for functioning with diverse people, and a lesser
propensity for competing and taking. I also estimate that White people
would be freed from their senses of curiosity and fear of Black people,
which we would realize based on their "cool" in our presence
and their dealings with us. Finally, now restored to their precolonial
mental health, White people would experience less generalized anxiety,
as it is extinguished by liberation of their many repressed memories,
thereby liberating them. In the end, there would be harmony.

Concluding Thoughts

A certain disconnect between European and African peoples has been
born from a history of repressed memories about Black people, or perhaps
a string of repressed memories, by White people, and suppression of
self, especially in the presence of Whites, by Black people. While the
repression of pre-colonial memories by White people is engaged in
primarily on the subconscious level, their reactions to it are often
conscious, resulting in defensiveness against guilt and/or fear and
backlash against Black people, and especially Black people who dignify
their own community and culture. With this, many Black people, based on
my experiences and scholarship, suppress themselves psychological,
physically, and behaviorally as a protective mechanism against White
backlash. Taken together, I have proposed the disconnect to be
interracial dissonance, defined as feelings of physical, psychological,
and social disconnect resulting in divergent ideas and intentions
(Chandler, 2010). I have said also that interracial dissonance orders
the phenomenological properties that shape the perceptions and
interactions of people in cross-racial situations. Left unchecked, the
force of interracial dissonance on both communities results ultimately
in the creation of caricatures worth loathing on either side; from
devils and niggers to crackas and coons, enemy and foe.

In this situation neither Black nor White is understood, amongst
themselves or each other. Interracial dissonance spawns not only
fabricated images, but also psychological, physical, and spiritual
distancing from one another. As with any internal dysfunction,
repercussions occur outwardly, effecting and affecting in this case the
actual lived conditions of the dysfunctional people. Disparities between
the rates of health, formal education, employment, economic, and
political representation of Black and White people run deep in the
United States (e.g., Asante, 2011; Chandler, 2010; Ture & Thelwell,
2003). Under the revelation of interracial dissonance, problems such as
disproportionate illness and school failure rates become self-evident.
Being the numerical minority in America, Black people have a much harder
time of maintaining distance from White people. As a result, many Black
people wind up avoiding entire systems in pursuit of happiness. To be
more specific, because most medical and psychological doctors are White,
Black people are compelled by intuition to avoid the entire system of
healthcare (Chandler, 2010; Washington, 2006).

The same may be said for the disengagement of many Africans,
especially African Americans in the realm of education today (Major
& Billson, 1992; Ogbu, 1993; 2004). The only American system that
Black people might be said to frequent is the prison system and this
only as the result of entrapments implanted in the political and
judiciary systems, which we refer to as institutionalized racism
(Chandler, 2010; Goodie Mob, 1998; T.I., 2003; Ture & Hamilton,
1967/1992).

We all lose from racially intoxicating conditions in the end. Where
many White people experience certain material and political privileges
that may allude to victory, they too lose bits of themselves and respect
from others with each act they put on in concealment of their true
selves. As long as White people opt to restrict the histories and
abilities of Black people everywhere, then they will continue to be
fearful, apprehensive and supremacist toward Black people under a shroud
of dissonance. As long as Black people feel White people's
dissonance toward them, then they will continue to be vigilant, agitated
and critical toward Whites. Additionally, many Black people will
continue to be culturally dislocated and therefore only partially
participatory in the continued development of world society; one cannot
give their best if they are ashamed of it.

I believe that a healing is possible, and certainly needed (e.g.,
De La Soul, 2004). With regard to healing, it is important to note that
I do not speak in absolute terms. Significant differences are to be
expected between Africans and Europeans, given their divergent
philosophies, psychologies and cultures. This diversity should be
celebrated. Engagement in intra-cultural and intercultural education can
be extremely enjoyable. Congruously, the antidote for interracial
dissonance involves the work and input of both ethnic groups. At
present, the feeling of dissonance is mutual, and the only thing that
can correct the discord between Black and White people, collectively
speaking, is intercultural awareness. Intercultural awareness is one of
few ingredients in the realization of hope for our respective and
collective futures. Greater understanding of our personal and fellow
human's history and culture is required because understanding is
the first step toward living and letting live.

To close on this note, what I did not share in the introductory
anecdote above is that I wear my hair naturally, and with that I tend to
wear "ethnic" looking clothing, indicated by color schemes and
jewelry if not by material and design pattern. While, like many African
Americans I have grown accustomed to encounters of interracial
dissonance with Europeans, which have occurred far more frequently after
beginning to wear my hair and style my clothes naturally, accustomed
does not mean accepted. It is my contention that we never will accept
encounters of interracial dissonance and self-suppression. Learning, on
the other hand, is something that both Black and White people alike have
shown themselves in history to enjoy. Let us now begin again to enjoy
intercultural awareness and acceptance in the name of hope for the
future.

Nkrumah, K. (2009). Consciencism: Philosophy and ideology for
de-colonization and development with particular reference to the African
revolution. NY: Monthly Review Press. (Original work published in 1964).

Nobles, W.W. (2006). Seeking the Sakhu: Foundational writings for
an African psychology. IL: Third World Press.

Zirin, D. (2012, March 23). Jackie Robinson, Trayvon Martin, and
the sad history of Sanford, FL. The Nation. Retrieved on March 28, 2012
from http://www.thenation.com/blog/166992/jackie-robinson-trayvon-martin- and-sad-historysanfordflorida.

by

Amanishakete Ani, Ph.D.

amaniani7@gmailcom

University of Wisconsin at Madison Germantown Psychological
Associates

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Amanishakete Ani was previously named Daphne R. Chandler. She
received her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology at the University of
Wisconsin at Madison in October of 2011. She has since written her first
book defining hope and school achievement among Black children, and she
is currently writing her second book expanding on the issue of
interracial dissonance and hope for the global society. Her primary
professional interests include increasing understanding, health and
prosperity of African peoples.

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you were the only
person present of your sex, race, or nationality? If so, your
difference from the others probably made you more noticeable and
the object of more attention. A Black in an otherwise White group,
a man in an otherwise female group, or a woman in an otherwise male
group seems more prominent and influential and to have exaggerated
good and bad qualities. This occurs because, when someone in a
group is made salient, we tend to see that person as causing
whatever happens. (p. 360)

The colonized man will first manifest this aggressiveness which has
been deposited in his bones against his own people. This is the
period when the niggers beat each other up ... a positive negation
of common sense is evident ... While the settler or the policeman
has the right the livelong day to strike the native, to insult him
and to make him crawl to them, you will see the native reaching for
his knife at the slightest hostile or aggressive glance cast on him
by another native; for the last resort of the native is to defend
his personality vis-a-vis his brother (p. 52-54).